NY's Female HS: "I
would not wish to be understood as advocating their [girls’] attention to
any abstract branch of science.Such knowledge is not necessary for them."

1833 Oberlin; first
women’s degrees 1842;

coeducation 1860s Iowa
& Wisconsin,

1870s Michigan, Maine
& Cornell.

all-women's schools -
Seven Sisters:

1837 Mary Lyon
establishes Mount Holyoke (South Hadley, Mass)

preparation for New
England teachers

student-teacher relation
echo mother-daughter link

82.5% graduates before
1850 taught school;

missionaries &
homemakers;

1860 Vassar, first
endowed women's college (Poughkeepsie, NY)

Matthew Vassar

"to build &
endow a College for young women which shall be to them what Yale & Harvard
are to young men."

fear - education
"unsexing" women

Founder: "lest by
too close an imitation of studies of ordinary colleges, we should impair
womanliness in our students & encourage the formation of those mannish
tastes & manners which are so disgusting to every right mind."

medical lecture room,
geology collections, astronomical observatory.

Maria Mitchell –
discovered new comet 1847.

gold medal from King of
Denmark.

Elected first woman
member American Academy of Arts & Sciences;

first woman American
Association for Advancement of Science;

1865 Vassar, "the
best educated women in the world."

Mitchell: "the
perceptive faculties of women are more acute than those of men.Women would perceive the size, form
& color of an object more readily & would catch an impression more
quickly.The training of girls
(bad
as it is) leads them to develop these faculties.The fine needlework & the embroidery teach them to
measure small spaces.The same
delicacy of eye & touch is needed to bisect the image of a star as to piece
delicate muslin.The small fingers
too come into play with a better adaptation to delicate micrometer
screws."

whole generation of
America’s first female astronomers.

1875 Wellesley (outside
Boston)

women presidents,
trustees, all-female faculty;

Henry Durant

"What
would Massachusetts be if our 9000 women teachers were all of them educated
Christians?"

"we revolt against
the slavery in which women are held by the customs of society - the broken
health, the aimless lives, the subordinate position, the helpless dependence,
and shams of so-called education.The higher education of women is the cry of the oppressed slave, the
assertion of absolute equality, the war of Christ."

1875 Smith College
(Northampton, Mass)

Sophie Smith

"design to furnish
for my own sex means & facilities for education equal to those which are
afforded now to young men.It is
not my design to render my sex any the less feminine, but to develop as fully
as may be the powers of womanhood & furnish women with means of usefulness,
happiness & honor now withheld from them."

"It is to preserve
her womanliness that this College has been founded… More time will be
devoted than in other colleges to aesthetical study, to the arts of drawing and
the acquisition of musical skill."

"Is it mere
prejudice which causes so general a feeling of aversion to some women whose
energy, heroism & ability we cannot but admire?Has not their training repressed their amiable qualities
& made them very frequently excessively conceited?"

Didn't want "the
gentlewoman to be lost in the strongminded."

"What if the same
forces which develop all that is most manly in one sex repress & dwarf all
that is most womanly in the other?"

1885 Bryn Mawr (PA)
– graduate degrees

President M. Carey
Thomas – PhD Univ Zurich

1878 Radcliffe - Arthur
Gilman

Harvard Annex -
"The Society for the Collegiate Instruction of women"

"to afford to women
opportunities for carrying their studies systematically forward further than it
is possible for them now to do in this country."

"a number of
professors in Harvard have consented to give private tuition to properly
qualified young women who desire to pursue advanced studies in Cambridge.No instruction will be provided of a
lower grade than that given in Harvard."

Soon attracts 27
students;

official limbo –
no buildings, no faculty;

"our students
quietly pursue their occupations as unnoticed as the daughters of any Cambridge
residents."

1889 Barnard - annex to
Columbia;

1891 over 10,000 women
in colleges - over 33% all students in college;

1881 Association of
Collegiate Alumnae;

isolated - "few
ways outside the home in which such equipment of knowledge might be utilized to
advantage."

expand opportunities,
provided network;

now American Association
of Univ. Women;

health of college women
- on trial

Harvard doctor Edward
Clarke;

women's nature defined
in terms of reproductive capacity;

1870 doctor, "as if
the Almighty, in creating the female sex, had taken the uterus and built up a
woman around it."Menstruation, child-bearing, menopause;

1900 president American
Gynecology Society, "Many a young life is battered & forever crippled
on the breakers of puberty; if it crosses these unharmed & is not dashed to
pieces on the rock of childbirth, it may still ground on the ever-recurring
shallows of menstruation, & lastly upon the final bar of the menopause ere
protection is found in the unruffled waters of the harbor beyond reach of
sexual storms."

Menopause "death of
the woman in the woman"

popular health manuals,
"We cannot too emphatically urge the importance of regarding these monthly
returns [menstruation] as period of ill health, when ordinary occupations are
to be suspended or modified.Long
walks, dancing, shopping, riding & parties should be avoided at this time
of month under all circumstances."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1880s "nervous disease" – doctor told her, "Live as
domestic a life as possible.Have your child with you all the time.Lie down an hour after each meal.have but two hours intellectual life a day, and never touch
pen, brush or pencil as long as you live."Gilman: "I came perilously close to losing my
mind."

Wellesley "large
gymnasium where students are instructed in calisthenics."

course in human anatomy
& hygiene;

"Few of us who were
put through our course in the little old cramped & battered College Hall
gymnasium have ever worn unnatural shoes, gone deliberately without sleep, or
grown round-shouldered without a guilty sense of having fallen below Miss
Hill's
standard of intelligent living."

"women who will
make the next generation strong, who are strong themselves & able to cope
with the struggles of the workaday world."

Catherine Beecher: the
"perfectly healthy woman" was one "who can through the whole day
be actively employed on her feet in all kinds of domestic duties without
injury, & constantly & habitually has a feeling of perfect health &
perfect freedom from pain."